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Thomas Sowell: Creating artificial stupidity
https://www.ocregister.com/2010/03/11/thomas-sowell-creating-artificial-stupidity/?
By Thomas Sowell | Orange County Register, March 11, 2010 at 12:59 p.m.
A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.
She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide – a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.
This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound – in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.
People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.
Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have, instead, been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia.
Many conservatives have protested against the specifics of the things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the whole neoconservative movement.
The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side – and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.
It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think, about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class and gender.”
Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.
Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, they promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions – in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, without either a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side or the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.
When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or – worse yet – follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.
A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.
It takes a certain amount of knowledge just to understand the extent of one’s own ignorance. But our “educators” have given assignments to children who are not yet a decade old to write letters to members of Congress, or to presidents, spouting off on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to medical care.
Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.
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About Thomas Sowell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, historian, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.[1] He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics, and political science.[a]
Born in poverty in North Carolina, Sowell grew up in Harlem, New York.[2] Due to financial issues and deteriorated home conditions, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. Upon returning to the United States, Sowell took night classes at Howard University before matriculating at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1958.[3] He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.
Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University, Amherst College, University of California, Los Angeles, and, currently, Stanford University. He has also worked at think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he serves as the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell writes primarily from a libertarian perspective, though he dislikes being labelled ideologically. His philosophy made him particularly influential to the new conservative movement during the Reagan Era, influencing fellow economist Walter Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Sowell was offered a presidential position in the Nixon Administration and as Federal Trade Commissioner by the Ford Administration in 1976, but declined both offers.[4] Similarly, he was offered to head the U.S. Department of Education as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, but refused to take the position.[5]
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books[b] and is a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers.
Academic career[edit]
From 1965 to 1969, Sowell was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. Writing 30 years later about the 1969 seizure of Willard Straight Hall by black students at Cornell, Sowell characterized the students as "hoodlums" with "serious academic problems [who were] admitted under lower academic standards", and noted "it so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca."[17]
Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and the University of California, Los Angeles. At Howard, Sowell was offered the position as head of the economic department, but he declined.[18] Since 1980, he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman, his mentor.[12][19] In addition, Sowell appeared several times on William F. Buckley Jr.'s show Firing Line, during which he discussed the economics of race and privatization. Throughout his time teaching at different universities, Sowell gradually lost faith in the academic system, citing increasingly low academic standards and counterproductive university bureaucracy—he resolved to leave teaching after his time at the University of California, Los Angeles.[18] In A Personal Odyssey, he recounts, "I had come to Amherst, basically, to find reasons to continue teaching. What I found instead were more reasons to abandon an academic career.”[18]
In 1987, Sowell testified in favor of federal appeals court judge Robert Bork during the hearings for Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his testimony, Sowell said that Bork was "the most highly qualified nominee of this generation" and that what he viewed as judicial activism, a concept that Bork opposed as a self-described originalist and textualist, "has not been beneficial to minorities."[20]
In a review of Sowell's 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions, Larry D. Nachman in Commentary magazine described Sowell as a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics.[21]
Writings and thought[edit]
Themes of Sowell's writing range from social policy on race, ethnic groups, education, and decision-making, to classical and Marxian economics, to the problems of children perceived as having disabilities.
Sowell had a nationally syndicated column distributed by Creators Syndicate that was published in Forbes magazine, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New York Post, and other major newspapers, as well as online on websites such as RealClearPolitics, Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and the Jewish World Review.[22] Sowell commented on current issues, which include liberal media bias;[23] judicial activism (while defending originalism);[24] intact dilation and extraction (commonly known and described in U.S. federal law as, partial-birth abortion);[25] minimum wage; universal health care; the tension between government policies, programs, and protections and familial autonomy; affirmative action; government bureaucracy;[26] gun control;[27] militancy in U.S. foreign policy; the war on drugs; and multiculturalism.[28] According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Sowell was the most cited black economist between 1991 and 1995, and second most cited between 1971 and 1990.[29]
On December 27, 2016, Sowell announced the end of his syndicated column, writing that, at age 86, "the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long," and cited a desire to focus on his photography hobby.[30]
A documentary detailing his career entitled "Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World" was released on January 25, 2021, by the Free to Choose Network.[31][32]
Economic and political ideology[edit]
Until the Spring of 1972, Sowell was a registered Democrat, after which he then left the Democratic Party and resolved not to associate with any political party again, stating "I was so disgusted with both candidates that I didn't vote at all."[33] Though he is often described as a black conservative, Sowell said, "I prefer not to have labels, but I suspect that 'libertarian' would suit me better than many others, although I disagree with the libertarian movement on a number of things."[15] He has been described as one of the most prominent advocates of contemporary classical liberalism along with Friedrich Hayek and Larry Arnhart.[34] Sowell primarily writes on economic subjects, generally advocating a free market approach to capitalism.[35] Sowell opposes the Federal Reserve, arguing that it has been unsuccessful in preventing economic depressions and limiting inflation.[36] Sowell described his serious study of Karl Marx in his autobiography; as a former Marxist who early in his career became disillusioned with the philosophy, he emphatically opposes Marxism, providing a critique in his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (1985).
Sowell has also written a trilogy of books on ideologies and political positions, including A Conflict of Visions, in which he speaks on the origins of political strife; The Vision of the Anointed, in which he compares the conservative/libertarian and liberal/progressive worldviews; and The Quest for Cosmic Justice, in which, as in many of his other writings, he outlines his thesis of the need felt by intellectuals, politicians, and leaders to fix and perfect the world in utopian and ultimately, he posits, disastrous fashions. Separate from the trilogy, but also in discussion of the subject, he wrote Intellectuals and Society, building on his earlier work, in which he discusses what he argues to be the blind hubris and follies of intellectuals in a variety of areas.
His book Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a "landmark work," selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the centre acclaimed Sowell, whose "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [his] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant."[37] Friedrich Hayek wrote: "In a wholly original manner [Sowell] succeeds in translating abstract and theoretical argument into highly concrete and realistic discussion of the central problems of contemporary economic policy."[38]
Sowell opposes the imposition of minimum wages by governments, arguing in his book Basic Economics that "Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force."[39] He goes further to argue that minimum wages disproportionately affect "members of racial or ethnic minority groups" that have been discriminated against. He asserts that "Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 – all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly... By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males."[40]
Sowell also favors decriminalization of all drugs.[41] He opposes gun control laws, arguing, "On net balance, they do not save lives, but cost lives."[27]
Race and ethnicity[edit]
Sowell argues that systemic racism is an untested, questionable hypothesis that is a piece of propaganda pushed on the American people. Sowell has said that "it really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses" and "it's one of many words that I don't think even the people who use it have any clear idea what they're saying". He has argued that it is a propaganda tactic akin to those used by Joseph Goebbels because it comes with an attitude that it must be "repeated long enough and loud enough" until it is believed and people "cave in" to it.[42][43]
In several of his works—including The Economics and Politics of Race (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action Around the World (2004), and other books—Sowell challenges the notion that black progress is due to progressive government programs or policies. He claims that many problems identified with blacks in modern society are not unique, neither in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat struggling with disruption as it became urbanized, as discussed in his Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005).
Sowell also writes on racial topics, typically critical of affirmative action and race-based quotas.[44][45] He takes strong issue with the notion of government as a helper or savior of minorities, arguing that the historical record shows quite the opposite. In Affirmative Action Around the World,[46] Sowell holds that affirmative action affects more groups than is commonly understood, though its impacts occur through different mechanisms, and has long since ceased to favor blacks.
In Intellectuals and Race (2013), Sowell argues that intelligence quotient (IQ) gaps are hardly startling or unusual between, or within, ethnic groups. He notes that the roughly 15-point gap in contemporary black–white IQ scores is similar to that between the national average and the scores of certain ethnic white groups in years past, in periods when the nation was absorbing new immigrants.[48]
Late-talking and the Einstein syndrome[edit]
Sowell wrote The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late, a follow-up to his Late-Talking Children, discussing a condition he termed the Einstein syndrome. This book investigates the phenomenon of late-talking children, frequently misdiagnosed with autism or pervasive developmental disorder. He includes the research of Stephen Camarata and Steven Pinker, among others, in this overview of a poorly understood developmental trait. It is a trait which he says affected many historical figures who developed prominent careers, such as physicists Albert Einstein,[49] Edward Teller, and Richard Feynman; mathematician Julia Robinson; and musicians Arthur Rubinstein and Clara Schumann. He makes the case for the theory that some children develop unevenly (asynchronous development) for a period in childhood due to rapid and extraordinary development in the analytical functions of the brain. This may temporarily "rob resources" from neighboring functions such as language development. Sowell disagrees with Simon Baron-Cohen's speculation that Einstein may have had Asperger syndrome.[50]
Politics[edit]
In a 2009 column titled "The Bush Legacy", Sowell assessed President George W. Bush as "a mixed bag" but "an honorable man."[51] Sowell was strongly critical of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and begrudgingly endorsed Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, criticizing him as well, and stating that "we can only make our choices among those actually available".[52] Sowell indicated that he would vote in the general election against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, due to fears about the appointments Clinton would possibly make to the Supreme Court.
In 2020, Sowell wrote that if the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, it could signal a point of no return for the United States, a tipping point akin to the fall of the Roman Empire. In an interview in July 2020, he stated that "the Roman Empire overcame many problems in its long history but eventually it reached a point where it could no longer continue, and much of that was from within, not just the barbarians attacking from outside." Sowell wrote that if Biden became president, the Democratic Party would have an enormous amount of control over the nation, and if this happened, they could twin with the "radical left" and ideas such as defunding the police could come to fruition.[43][53]
Donald Trump[edit]
During the Republican primary of the 2016 presidential election, Sowell criticized Donald Trump, questioning whether Trump had "any principles at all, other than promoting Donald Trump?"[54] Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Sowell recommended voters to vote for Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2018, when asked on his thoughts of Trump's presidency, Sowell replied, "I think he's better than the previous president."[55]
During interviews in 2019, Sowell defended Trump against charges of racism.[56][57]
Education[edit]
Sowell has written about education throughout his career. He has argued for the need for reform of the school system in the United States. In his latest book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020), Sowell compares the educational outcomes of school children educated at charter schools with those at conventional public schools. In his research, Sowell first explains the need and his methodology for choosing comparable students—both ethnically and socioeconomically—before listing his findings. He presents the case that charter schools on the whole do significantly better in terms of educational outcomes than conventional schools.[58][59][60]
Sowell argues that many U.S. schools are failing children; contends that "indoctrination" has taken the place of proper education; and argues that teachers' unions have promoted harmful education policies. Sowell contends that many schools have become monopolies for educational bureaucracies.[61]
In his book Education: Assumptions Versus History (1986), Sowell analyzes the state of education in U.S. schools and universities. In particular, he examines the experiences of blacks and other ethnic groups in the American education system and identifies the factors and patterns behind both success and failure.[62]
